Trump administration launches aggressive campaign against the ICC: The US is using a “whole-of-government” approach — including sanctions, travel bans, and diplomatic pressure — to dismantle the International Criminal Court’s operations and protect American officials and servicemen from potential prosecution.

The move is driven by sovereignty concerns and retaliation: Officials like Marco Rubio portray the ICC as an illegitimate “globalist” threat that undermines US independence, especially after investigations into alleged crimes in Afghanistan and arrest warrants for allies like Netanyahu.

Critics see it as hypocritical and dangerous: The article argues the US is shielding itself and allies from accountability for war crimes while boasting about executive power and self-enrichment, undermining international law and human rights institutions.

Why are they so afraid?  The Trump administration, pathologically obsessed about the exaggerated reach of the International Criminal Court, have decided to take to the barricades.  In a July 13 media note released by a spokesperson for the US State Department, something akin to a declaration of war was made against the Hague-based tribunal.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio was getting bolshie about it, announcing “a sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by [the court] to US sovereignty.”  The effort promises to “feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”  The late Henry Kissinger, who argued most stridently against the establishment of such a criminal court, would no doubt have approved.  He, more than most, would have feared some eventual accounting for his own egregious crimes against international humanitarian law while serving the White House. 

The alarmist tone of the announcement is palpable.  The ICC was seeking “to become an unaccountable global arbiter – positioning itself above and beyond the nation state as a supranational enforcement arm of a globalist bureaucracy empowered to prosecute American servicemen and officials at will.”  (This has a whiff of familiarity to it, given that the Department of Justice under Trump’s steering hand has been prosecuting, at will, individuals perceived to have wronged him in the past.)

The media release is filled with careless distortions and ugly inaccuracies, not least in the sovereignty it purports to........

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